Practical Wisdom for Leaders with Scott J. Allen, Ph.D.

Dr. Mary Crossan and Corey Crossan - Building Better Leaders: How Character Outshines Competence

• Scott J. Allen • Season 1 • Episode 265

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Corey Crossan is a research and teaching fellow at The Oxford Character Project where she develops and facilitates character development programs for students and industry. She is also the co-founder of Virtuosity Character, a mobile software application created to support the daily, deliberate practice of character-based leadership development.

Dr. Mary Crossan is a Distinguished University Professor and Professor of Strategic Leadership at the Ivey Business School at Western University, Ontario. She is also a co-founder of Virtuosity Character and co-host of the “Question of Character” podcast.


A Quote From This Episode

  • "We discovered that it wasn’t a failure of competence, but largely this failure of character.”


Resources Mentioned in This Episode

 

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About  Scott J. Allen


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  • The views of my guests do not constitute "truth." Nor do they reflect my personal views in some instances. However, they are views to consider, and I hope they help you clarify your perspective. Nothing can replace your reflection, research, and exploration of the topic.


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Note: Voice-to-text transcriptions are about 90% accurate, and conversations-to-text do not always translate perfectly. I include it to provide you with the spirit of the conversation.

Scott Allen  0:00 

Okay, everybody. Welcome to Practical Wisdom for Leaders. Thank you so much for checking in today. I have two guests, a mother and a daughter. I think that's a first for the podcast, so that's fun. You are listening to a first in the history of the podcast. I have Corey Crossan. She is a research and teaching fellow at the Oxford Character Project where she develops and facilitates character development programs for students and industry. She is also the co-founder of Virtuosity Character, a mobile software application created to support the daily deliberate practice of character-based leadership development. I also have her mother, Dr. Mary Crossan is a distinguished university professor and professor of strategic leadership at the Ivey Business School at Western University in Ontario, Canada. She is also a co-founder of Virtuosity Character and co-host of The Question of Character podcast. To the two of you, thank you so much for being with me today. Corey, this is our second introduction with one another. We had a wonderful breakfast in Oxford last summer when my family was visiting England, and it was just such a fun conversation. And I am so happy that we have the opportunity to connect today. Now, maybe each of you can say a little bit about yourselves that maybe isn't in your bio.

 

Corey Crossan  1:19 

Yeah. It's really fun to think back to the last time that we did meet, and so much has happened since then. I think the one thing that's not on my bio is that I actually got married a few weeks ago, so it's been an exciting few months. And I was thinking back to one of our conversations about North Americans being in the UK and doing all the white-knuckle driving on the back roads. And so, we had a lot of those stories with all of our Canadian family coming over, and just everyone barely getting through the back roads to make it to our wedding venues. That's what's been up for me.

 

Scott Allen  1:55 

Oh, the hedgerows won. If you want to test the knowledge skills and ability, most importantly, the ability around emotional intelligence, put Scott among hedgerows in a rental car. It doesn't go well. Well, congratulations, that is so awesome. I knew that you were looking forward to the wedding, and now it's happened. And so, congratulations. That's awesome.

 

Mary Crossan  2:15 

Yeah. So, a very quick background beyond that bio, perhaps that I'm 40 years now at the Ivey Business School, and I'm thinking about your listeners in the leadership space. And I can just say that I wish I had come across this a lot sooner in my life. And then, if I think about the bio and lots of things I've written about or studied, this one has become quite seminal. I think, to the point where I have such a commitment to the work in this area. In the deep leadership to practice space, you see, we've done the application on character, the mobile application, The Question of Character Podcast series, and also a consulting firm: Leader Character Associates. So, I'm one of these academics that has this kind of background in the theory, but really, how do we anticipate what we need in organizations? 

 

Scott Allen  3:10 

And I love that perspective because I think that that interface of how the theory meets practice, it's a fascinating space. It really is and the two of you are really experimenting with that place, obviously associated with world-class institutions and steeped in the theory, knowledgeable in the theory. But as you've begun to really, really work to bring this to business, bring it to industry, bring it to other venues, I'm sure there's a ton of learning that's happened. So, I think that's where I would love to take the conversation in the general sense. This topic of character, this topic of values, the ethical dimension of the whole conversation around leadership is so incredibly important. It's foundational. I had a guest on the podcast, and I loved his phrasing. He said, “Better humans, better performance.” And so, how do we as humans show up as a more whole individual? And if you put a more whole individual in a position of authority, I don't know, maybe we're better off I would hope. That's the theory. But what are a couple of observations you've had in bringing this application to the world, a couple of learnings. It could be insights. It could be surprises. I'm just excited for you to share that with listeners.

 

Mary Crossan  4:27 

May be a good place is for me to start and Corey to pick up because we bring some different kinds of expertise around. Mine comes from a bit of a historical perspective, but I think the ‘aha’ moment for me is you take something as foundational in philosophy and psychology as the study of virtue and character. And you would have thought that we should be really far ahead in being able to apply this in organizations and in life. And so, one of the things that we find is just the massive gap between what we know about character and what people are actually doing in organizations. And perhaps my background coming from a business school where organizations are the instrument for societal change, for better, or for worse. There's been a lot of worse that's been happening. The reason we got into it was in 2008 with the economic crisis putting leadership on trial. And I think, for those leadership scholars that are listening, they can probably relate to what we were finding back in that period of time that, in many cases, it wasn't a failure of competence, but largely this failure of character. And practitioners were revealing, they didn't know what it was, they didn't know whether you could develop it. And thankfully, we began to imagine that we needed a pathway to be able to elevate character alongside competence in higher education and organizations, and that really is the pathway that we launched on. And perhaps something that becomes really important for academics in particular, and I guess a surprise to me in it is, if you are not able to anticipate, if you want to call it the architecture, where you need to apply something, you end up, as I've described it, creating a weak foundation for its application. And so, what we have found all along the way is saying, “Well, what would it take to elevate character alongside competence?” That, for example, if we're going to select on character or we're going to be able to promote on character in organizations, well, we need a more robust understanding of that. And that's where Corey and I really partnered a lot, and I'll pass it over to you, Corey, is the whole idea of developing character as a cornerstone. So, maybe you could take that up.

 

Corey Crossan  6:52 

Yeah. So, I came at character from a very different place. I came at it from being an athlete wanting to be a professional golfer for most of my life, and also having an exercise science background. So, I was very much in a different type of development space, but I got drawn to character because I was in a place that I was actually really struggling. My well-being was struggling, my performance was struggling in golf, and I would describe myself as actually having crippling anxiety at a point in my life. Falling into this character area was a huge ‘aha’ moment for me, and it was first coming at it from that well-being space. What I found really impactful was this idea of practical wisdom. So, how do you have this practical wisdom? And coming across the character framework that we work with a lot, it has 11 dimensions, things like courage, temperance, drive, that kind of thing. But it helped me think of behavioral development through a paradigm, through a framework. And what I realized growing up, especially in the sport context, is that we were privileging a lot of those virtues, like courage and drive, but without the support of other dimensions like humility, humanity, temperance, that courage and drive was becoming what we call excess vices in character. So, striving for excellence was becoming striving for perfection. And without the humility to support it, I was finding myself in that crippling anxiety spot because, of course, you're going to make mistakes in sport. You can't be perfect. And so, it really made a big difference on my well-being, and then domino effect on my performance. And I do think, from a really interesting standpoint, back to leadership. I was doing coaching and a lot of different leadership stuff, and it really does help bring the best of yourself into everything you do through this paradigm or framework of character. And so, because of my background in exercise science, I became really obsessed with how do we actually intentionally develop this now that we know it can be so impactful?

 

Scott Allen  9:11 

Well, yeah. We've got the character wheel, and it's beautiful. And for listeners, you're going to have a link to that in the show notes so you'll be able to access what word it is where that we're discussing. But you've got this, and then how do we change humans behavior? How do we help humans behave differently? I think it was Muhammad Ali, “Everyone has a plan until they get hit in the face.” Once this interfaces with reality, it's a very, very different gig because it sounds beautiful and it's very, very ideal. So, that's fun because you've got the athletics background, and we're actually trying to build knowledge, skill, competency in that domain, regardless of the sport. And that's happening in certain ways. So, your mind is now thinking, “Okay, how do we do this work with these types of topics and truly help humans, just, it might be in a better place, have a sounder understanding, be more intentional about how they move forward?” All of that. So, what have you all learned as you've interfaced with the world on this topic? Because I love how you're thinking about it. What I know of the app; very impressive. It reminded me a little bit of some James Clear, ‘Atomic Habits,’ or BJ Fogg, ‘Tiny Habits.’ It's kind of a daily practice. It's a practice. It's not necessarily a two-hour session that I sit in as the sole intervention. That might be a piece of it, but there's more.

 

Mary Crossan  10:38 

Scott, I use this language, the world is on fire and we need more firefighters. It's like when it comes to character, the demands in this world and on organizations exceed our capacity. So, as I started as a strategy and leadership scholar, it's saying, “Well, what can we do in our organizations to do this?” Because Corey will talk about the fact that we know how to do it. We know how to develop character, so how do we get, both in higher education and organizations, people to say, “Let's take up the charge”? So, number one, the first thing we learned is that we needed the empirical research to demonstrate the value elevating character alongside competence. So, want to help listeners understand that work has been done. There is all sorts of demonstration around that because people had relegated character to mostly values and ethics. And it's a ‘nice to have,’ but you operate with one hand behind your back. So, one of the first things that we dealt with was, well, let's understand the empirical evidence that shows that elevating character alongside competence leads to higher performance and well-being. So great, that work is done and people are going, “Okay. I'm convinced. It matters.” And then it became this whole narrative around organizations. I just wrote an article in Sloan Management Review about the idea that we hire for competence and fire for character. So then, now everybody's interested in, “Well, how do I select on this? How to identify character in individuals?” And again, for the listeners on the science side of this, there's a whole paradigm around competence-based selection, so how do we actually create a foundation that is robust enough that we can actually say we can select on character? Therefore, you need all the empirical work to say this is a foundation for character, etc. So great, we do all of that. And one of the things that we've found ourselves getting back to, and there's no way around this, that everything that we do is going to be dependent on the development of character. And that isn't just cultivating awareness, language about character, but it's actually implementing it on a daily basis. It's leading back to the work that Corey is doing on development. 

 

Corey Crossan  13:02 

It's been interesting because it's been a blessing and a curse in the sense that, when we introduce people to character, especially the framework that we work with, it seems to be an ‘aha’ moment for a lot of people. And the blessing part is that it does hug people. It aligns with people. It helps people understand their own behavior, the behavior of others. But the curse is that you feel really empowered and equipped with understanding this kind of comprehensive language of character, and so people feel like that's really kind of good enough to help guide their character. And what we're trying to do is get them behind, or what we call this temporary bump of learning about character, but actually developing it on a day-to-day basis. And I've actually done maybe a dozen development programs over the last year, and we've started parsing out the difference between learning about character in a monthly session, for example, versus developing character on a day-to-day basis, which we usually do, equipping participants with the app. And when people reassess their character over a period of time, we're finding that people that just do the sessions self-report on, actually, increasing their character, whereas the people that I call are in the trenches focusing on their character on a day-to-day basis actually report their character more critically over time. And so, this really interesting insight, learning versus development, what does that actually look like in character development? Leadership development has been a really interesting insight for us.

 

Scott Allen  14:41 

Well, it goes back to… At least, my mind just went to that old model. I forget who did this model, maybe you all know; Unconscious incompetence, conscious incompetence, conscious competence, unconscious competence. And maybe if we are actually challenging someone to engage in this work, you become really pretty aware of, “Oh, okay, there's potentially some gaps here.” Or, “Of course, we're going to be confronted with, in a more intentional way, it would seem to me, where maybe we're lacking in our abilities.” Then if I just had a nice learning experience and kind of go along my way and don't think all that critically about it, don't have to actually wrestle with the material, don't have to actually live the material, fail with the material, then, just as a human being, “All good.” Those cognitive biases take over. 

 

Mary Crossan  15:34 

Yeah. These blind spots that we have, all of us have, this idea that we judge ourselves on our intention and others on their behavior. So, when it comes to character development, it's very interesting because there's so much virtues, work, which is about good intention and right intention. And what we try to do in the character work is get people to… The observable behaviors is in how can I be accountable for the fact that I didn't intend to be abrasive in how I came across, or I didn't intend to disrespect you, but what is it about my observable behaviors that one could begin to see that what could have been a virtue is operating in a vice state. And the second part of that dilemma is we also have this sense that we are self-aware. And Tasha Eurich’s work on self-awareness reveals 85% of us believe we're self-aware, 10 to 15% are. So, we take this intention behavior gap, lack of self-awareness, is that what we hope to do in the character work is bring a really, if I want to call it sort of gentle space. You don't have to punish yourself about it, but you can, actually… You were talking a little bit earlier, Scott, about humor, is it begins actually to bring some lightness to the fact that… I joke about my decisiveness, which can often operate in the excess vice state. I think about it as the beginning of conversation, but a lot of people see it as the end of the conversation. And so, I can take some lightness about that and say, “But what do I need to do in the development of my humanity, my humility, my collaboration, so that people can actually see these facets of judgment?” The practical wisdom part, the cognitive complexity, all of that stuff working in its virtuous state.

 

Scott Allen  17:25 

So, it's really interesting that we're seeing those individuals who are actually engaging with the material taking a step back. So, I imagine something the two of you are thinking about is -- and Mary just gave us a little bit of a clue, how do we kind of fold their hand moving forward? It could be that we add a little bit of levity and humor, but what are some other ways you're thinking about that? Because, yeah, it's almost like you move into this valley of despair to the change curve, and then we're going to kind of guide you out and help you elevate to a new plateau. What do you think? 

 

Corey Crossan  18:01 

Yeah. I do think it's getting more comfortable being in that space, seeing that sense of possibility. I do think the other piece of it to help people feel like they can keep on developing their character. We talk about that it actually requires strength of character to develop character. So, in a lot of our programs, we'll get feedback like, “Oh, I didn't have the resilience to keep trying,” or, “It's really hard for me to forgive myself when I see I kind of fell off the bandwagon,” kind of thing. And so, I think this idea of just being really patient. Another virtue is trying to activate character as we're trying to develop character. Back to your James Clear comment, we do really focus on creating these systems to support the practice of character. I love his quote “We don't rise to the level of our goals, we fall to the level of our systems.” And so, one of the development frameworks we use that comes out of some research from the Oxford Character Project, they talk about seven strategies for character development. And so, we implement those into the program so that people do feel equipped and supported to be able to keep coming back to it. And I would say one of the biggest things is actually creating some kind of group focus or accountability. We find this in fitness and in exercise, that if you have an accountability partner, etc., it's a lot easier to keep with it. So, we do get into a lot of the really detailed little systems that we can construct to help people continue on their character development journey.

 

Scott Allen  19:39 

Sure. Mary.

 

Mary Crossan  19:40 

Yeah. To play on that when we, which I think is really interesting, is some of what we found in the development of character, there are some big systems that underpin it. Your physiology effect behavior cognition, and I thought leadership researchers might find that really interesting because it's not… If you just work on the cognitive system, and you're not thinking in your development functions about how you begin to regulate physiology in effect, people start to stumble a bit about it. You also get into the whole space of core beliefs that underpin some aspects of development. Like, “I'm not good at this, or, “I can't do this.” Character development in its design, as we think about some of these things, we try to anticipate all of this architecture in the app and use things like there's a progression that goes from just observing and identifying character in others, then activating on character. Then the next step is starting to strengthen a character dimension, understanding how that dimension connects to other dimensions, and then sustaining it across time and context. And I'll just give you a practical example, again, which I love is very research-based, is how we use music to activate character. And so, music is something that's available as a resource to all of us. Many people are using it, but they never think about how it might be used to develop character. And an article that we wrote in The Journal of Leadership and Organizational Studies looks at the PABC, underpinnings of character physiology effect behavior cognition. Its effects on character development, and understanding, for example, music works on the effect and physiology of us. It almost bypasses, really, the cognitive function. The major minor keys affect how we feel about things. It affects our heart rate. And then, if we begin to think about it, we can use music to activate on things like transcendence that uplifts us, or temperance to calm us. And Corey,  all of this, I was triggered by the fact that as you talked about these faces that people worry about and have difficulty with, then, in many cases, our development can activate several things simultaneously. So, you even ask the question, how does music activate your character? And now you're cultivating self-awareness. And now, when you share that with somebody else, you begin to cultivate some vulnerability. We start to activate on things like under-collaboration, being interconnected and open-minded because we share with one another something of an experience in our life. So, I wanted to just get out of the high-level description about what we do into an example because I think it really brings it to life a little bit about the practicality of bridging theory and practice.

 

Scott Allen  22:41 

Yeah. My mind right now is just… Even as you were speaking of music, I was trying to learn guitar. And, of course, you spend a great deal of time just learning a chord, and then maybe you learn a second chord. And there's that kind of Kay Anders Erickson developing expertise, that’s a very simple way of saying it is time, repetition, real-time coaching, and feedback, and working on a skill outside of your current ability level. The deliberate practice kind of domain. But what I respect in what you all are really exploring is how do we scaffold this in a way where, maybe, Corey, I'm going to communicate with you that you're going to feel overwhelmed? You will feel overwhelmed as you start practicing, golf, or improv, or guitar, but I'm here as a guide for you and we will push through that. And it's almost scaffolded in a way that is such small, incremental steps that I can begin to see those wins, and I can begin to have the confidence, and I can begin to build an identity. That's ultimately, in some ways, also it seems like we're tooling around in that space of shifting someone's identity here. So, I just have great respect for what you all are working on because scaffolding that learning. When we see what the ideal looks like we can show that to someone, but that feels very overwhelming. That's like me trying to play Eddie Van Halen right now. That's not a thing. That's not gonna happen. You can show me that guitar solo, but that's too far. So, I love how you all are thinking about, more importantly, experimenting with, how do we scaffold this so it truly can transform people's lives.

 

Corey Crossan  24:20 

Yeah. And I really liked when you were mentioning confidence there, when we're trying to kind of grow into an identity or develop confidence. I would say, for me and a lot of other people that go through or commit to character development, that's an area that they really find transforming is their confidence. And I think it's this idea of, again, having this really comprehensive vocabulary around character to, essentially, decode your own behavior. Why do you do these things? Does it lead to beneficial or harmful outcomes? How do I affect others? And then also understanding why other people are the way that they are. But I would say, back to essentially navigating uncertainty complexity. When you can truly understand your character, how you're likely to act, you have a lot more confidence of who you are likely to be in new context and who you actually want to be even when you're in a turbulent and difficult context.

 

Scott Allen  25:21 

Oh, that’s great phrasing. I love that phrasing. 

 

Mary Crossan  25:24 

And it's a nice connection, Corey, into trust. Trust is, of course, an area a lot of people are interested in leadership, but think about how much trust is. Trust in ourselves, trust in each other, and how much of that is trust in judgment. So, judgment is in the middle. It's the practical wisdom, it's this notion that if we have strength of humanity, and humility, and transcendence, and courage alongside competence, that this is what we can trust. We can trust in ourselves and we can trust in each other. So, it's very powerful with respect to what it can enable in the individual. One thing though, Scott, which is cool as a contrast to learning guitar, or, in my case, it was piano and clarinet, is they fall in the area of competence, really, knowledge, skills, and abilities, the KSAs. As you think about competencies, this other category started to bring in a few character-related pieces, but not all, which is a real problem, which is why we try to separate the two. And what is neat about character is that we have always been… These muscles are either developing or weakening. They are there. We are becoming somebody with more humility or less humility. So, it's not that it's an unfamiliar territory to us, it's more than, as Corey talked about, that once you have a roadmap to understand what it is and you can understand the architecture of it, now you can work with it. I read this article with Bill Furlong talking about leader character as aerodynamics, and thinking about it the equivalent in flight in the days where we were trying to flap our wings to get to flight. Well, it was not until we actually understand aerodynamics, something that we hadn't really seen but was there. And that there's an engineering that goes with that aerodynamics, and that's what we're talking about with the app. Sometimes we talk about it going to the character gem. There's an architecture, there's a protocol, there's ways of doing this. We can unpack that, and it is something that is familiar to people, but now we can actually see it in a very productive way.

 

Scott Allen  27:39 

Anything else that you want to highlight or underscore as we begin to wind down? What haven't we touched on that you want to, at least, have listeners be aware of?

 

Corey Crossan  27:49 

I think that Mary picked up that we talked about going to the character gym. And so, with the app, that's really what we've tried to do is create this space where people can go to it to exercise. But what I think is a little bit different is that when you think about going to the gym to exercise, usually that's at least 30 minutes a day, whereas what we've really tried to do with character is not make it another added thing to do to people's really busy lives, but actually create a really tiny touch point on a daily basis for people to come to that then allows them to transform how they're spending their entire day underpinned by character. So, for example, we bring this exercise approach to it where a big part of the app is actually giving people a daily character exercise. So, the idea is that they see it in the morning and it primes them to transform everything that they do in the day. So, one of my favorite ones comes from the improv exercises. It's a very classic principle called ‘The Yes and Principle.’ So, the idea is that you work on accepting ideas, people, whatever is presented to you, and building on that. So, if someone was focusing on collaboration, being open-minded, being flexible, that could be an exercise that they're trying to implement throughout the day. So, again, it's not adding time to people's really busy lives, but trying to help them activate that virtue that they're working on to transform their day.

 

Scott Allen  29:18 

Yeah. And are we working on multiple virtues at once, or is it fairly focused for a period of time? Can I just focus on the A chord and just get it down?

 

Corey Crossan  29:27 

Well, it's really interesting because I played with this. And early on in my Ph.D. research, I thought that maybe we were capable of focusing on three different virtues at a time, and we quickly realized that it's actually really hard to focus on that many things. You do feel spread thin. So, what we do is we get people to focus on one behavior each week. But I think the real important piece is that we are always encouraging people to reflect on how it's interconnected to other behaviors. And Brene Brown has done really great work on this, where she talks about ‘to be brave, we need to be vulnerable.’ And so, we encourage people to think about these connections for themselves. As you're focusing on one thing, continuing to think about the interconnectedness to the others. 

 

Scott Allen  30:13 

Yeah. It sounds like there's a little, almost a polarity management there, a little bit, from a Barry Johnson standpoint. Okay. Mary. 

 

Mary Crossan  30:22 

And I would add, as we close off, that, particularly as leadership researchers or scholars, sometimes we focus on one thing. So, there are 62 behaviors in that wheel, and really anticipating which is a big problem that's emerged, that ‘too much of a good thing problem,’ the Goldilocks problem, that something like grit, which is part of being tenacious and determined, it can act in its feist state. And it's not that you would diminish being tenacious or determined, but that you would need to elevate other aspects of character in order to have it operate in its virtuous state. So, I would hope that listeners who focus on a particular area might find it really fascinating to see that there is all of this constellation that helps to understand, sort of, the boundary conditions, if we want to call it, about why we've run into trouble on things like authenticity. Because we want to be authentic, but we don't want to be the authentic jerk, so how do we understand what that looks like? So, that would be the first piece to say that so much of the work we do on character is creating an architecture through which we then draw on scholars, great scholars who know a lot about self-awareness, or vulnerability, or grit, or resilience, and we can start to bring all of that together under this big architecture of saying, “If we're going to elevate character alongside competence in organizations, we've got all this scholarship that we can rely on.” And then the last thing is simply that it is a paradigm shift, and it's a big idea, but it's one that has a really solid and robust foundation. So, I hope that what people do is get excited about the possibility. There's a lot of tools in the toolkit, and there's a lot of possibility in it, so the sky is really the limit on what we could do here. 

 

Scott Allen  32:14 

Well, and it just feels so foundational for all of us. And it transcends not just leadership, but for happy, healthy, productive life. It transcends because we could look at it through the lens of parenting, we could look at it through the lens of coaching, we could look at it through the lens of teaching, leading. Anyone in a position of authority or any human being wanting to live a fulfilling life, there's clues here, there's very, very important clues here that can help in multiple domains. So, to the two of you, thank you very, very much. I always close out the podcast by asking what you've been reading, or streaming, or listening to? What's caught your attention in recent times?

 

Corey Crossan  32:54 

I've been reading a book. I was just getting it out in front of me, ‘The Science of Motivating Young People,’ actually. Because I work with a lot of undergrads, and I don't want to lose connection to understanding them. And this is actually recommended to me from a friend, Tim, who does coaching in football with, I think, 17-year-olds. And I think it does intrigue me just kind of remembering what it feels like to be a younger person, and so that's just something that I've been updating myself on just to make sure I remember what it feels like. 

 

Scott Allen  33:30

And who's the author of that? 

 

Corey Crossan  33:32

It's Dr. David Yeager.

 

Scott Allen  33:33 

Okay. Awesome. And, Mary. 

 

Mary Crossan  33:38 

So Corey and I are big fans; movies, shows, particularly documentaries based on real life. And then, mine are often about, of course, the strategic transformational quality about them. So, I got intrigued lightly about Freud. There was a piece around Freud, and I thought fascinating that some of his early work, I think one of his books was read by 100 people or something. And he had some terrible ideas, along with some that have been great ideas. And so, there's partly what's the difference between the terrible and the great. But I also found it interesting that it was the work around Freud where psychoanalysts, who had really not much in their toolkit at the time, were turning to things like talk therapy as a place. And you think, “Well, now of course, why wouldn't we ask people about their histories and their stories?” And so, I was thinking about, just in that, the access point where something that can be really good ideas, like we think about character, how it needs to get in the hands of the people who need it to deal with the problems of the world. And so, kind of went down a Freud rabbit hole to learn a little bit about him. Well, there's one movie which it's like the last conversation Freud has, and it's about this conversation that he has with CS Lewis in terms of just their different views of life, which is fascinating in and of itself. 

 

Corey Crossan  35:12 

It's a theoretical conversation.

 

Scott Allen  35:15 

How about Tolkien and Freud? That'd be interesting too. Well, to the two of you, thank you so much for all the good work you're doing. For listeners, there is a ton of links in the show notes, so please feel free to check those out. And I think this sounds like something perfect to implement into leader development program, course, just an educational experience. I think this sounds like it could be very, very applicable at work or in the context of higher education where people start to practice. In fact, as I was reviewing for our podcast today, I sent the app to David Day and just said, “Hey, check this out. This is some cool work that's being done,” because I know he's so interested in this space as well. So, the two of you, thank you. We'll do it again. 

 

Scott Allen  35:59 

Long-time listeners are going to know what I am about to say. I just have great respect for anyone who is taking theory to practice and innovating, creating, and these two are doing just that. And I think in this really, really foundational space, because I don't think we talk about values, character, virtues, we don't talk about that enough in a lot of the leader education that we do. And it's foundational. It seems like it is the foundation. So, to the two of you, thank you for all of the good work you are doing in the world. Excited to hear more about your explorations, what you're learning. As always, everyone, take care. Thank you so much. Be well. Bye-bye.

 

 

[End Of Recording]